Lombard

The Lombards are the people of the fertile Po plain of northern Italy, whose region is named after the Germanic Longobards who invaded in 568 and made Pavia their capital until Charlemagne deposed their last king Desiderius in 774.

In 1337 their cities, including Milan and Pavia, were manufacturing and banking communes, with Milan already dominated by the Visconti lords. Earlier, the cities had formed the Lombard League and defeated the emperor Frederick I at Legnano in 1176.

Their Lombard speech is a Gallo-Italic language on a Celtic and Latin base with a Germanic layer, used in administration until Tuscan displaced it in the fifteenth century, when Leonardo da Vinci was among the Florentine scholars drawn to the Sforza court. After Pavia in 1525 the Duchy of Milan passed to the Spanish crown, suffered the great plague of 1628 to 1630, and came under Austria in 1706; Napoleon made Milan his capital before the Congress of Vienna in 1815 merged the region into Austrian Lombardy-Venetia.